Sunday, November 21, 2010

Kidney Paired Donation

The first nationwide kidney paired donation, or KPD, took place about a week ago. This program uses an algorithm developed by my advisor, Tuomas Sandholm, and Avrim Blum (and edited by me!) at Carnegie Mellon University.

The initial run of the computer matching process included just 43 kidney transplant candidates and 45 potential living donors. The national KPD pool will eventually include as many as 10,000 donor-recipient pairs. Each pair includes a potential donor who is not medically compatible with his or her original intended recipient, or is less than an optimal match. The algorithm then checks for new combinations between the pairs based on compatible blood and tissue types, solving this problem optimally.

With nearly 87,000 people on the national kidney waiting list, hopefully this algorithm--in conjunction with the 77 participating hospitals across the country--will make a dent in this number.